Saturday, June 08, 2013

This is funny enough, I suppose. But I do wonder if all the people who said, "Obama has to wait until after the election. Then....THEN he'll start doing the right thing!" still believe that. At some point, you have to recognize that OBAMA is the zombie.

Abstract:
Despite much public speculation, there is little scholarly research on whether or how ideology shapes American consumer behavior. Borrowing from previous studies, we theorize that ideology is associated with different forms of taste and conspicuous consumption: liberals are more drawn to indicators of "cultural capital" and more feminine symbols while conservatives favor more explicit signs of "economic capital" and masculine cues. These ideas are tested using birth certificate, U.S. Census, and voting records from California in 2004. We find strong differences in birth naming practices related to race, economic status, and ideology. Although higher status mothers of all races favor more popular birth names, high status liberal mothers more often choose uncommon, culturally obscure birth names. Liberals also favor birth names with "softer, feminine" sounds while conservatives favor names with "harder, masculine" phonemes. These findings have significant implications for both studies of consumption and debates about ideology and political fragmentation in the United States.

If you remember the piece, it was a famous study by Rembrandt, of light and shadow. Called "The Night Watch," it was actually entitled "The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq," after the guy who commissioned it (Cocq? One of the Koch Brothers, I bet!)

Monday, June 03, 2013

"What he and his fellow researchers
discovered (here’s a PDF of their paper) is that most games of
chance involving coins aren’t as even as you’d think. For example, even the
50/50 coin toss really isn’t 50/50 — it’s closer to 51/49, biased toward
whatever side was up when the coin was thrown into the air.

But
more incredibly, as reported by Science News,
spinning a penny, in this case one with the Lincoln Memorial on the
back, gives even more pronounced odds — the [American] penny
will land tails side up roughly 80 percent of the time."

President Obama gives the same answers President Nixon gave, and for the same reasons. Once the President decides that illegal acts, if done by the President, are legal, simply because the President is doing them, you have become Nixon. Amazing that Bob Schiefer, poor old guy, is the one who points this out. Wow.

1. Victory through commercial sponsorship?: "The United States might not be the most popular country in the Middle East these days, but in addition to Chevrolet, [Arab Idol's] sponsors include Pepsi, Twix and Kentucky Fried Chicken"